I do accept other's moral sentiments as taste - maybe I'm some sort of sociopath? To hell with me. I see arguing over right and wrong as the mob enforcing its rule.
If you're not prepared to give up all claims on how others should act, then you're not really a moral relativist. And the point of the author is that, as a society, we seem to have an inconsistent position.
I disagree completely. The claim might simply be based on might. We as a society are more numerous and stronger than the occasional murderer, and therefore we'll act on our moral taste and punish him.
I agree that people don't actually think like that, but that doesn't prove that moral facts exists, just that many people think they do.
But if you're a moral relativist, you can't judge at all — you can't say "that killing was wrong, it was murder". The best you can say was "that killing was morally wrong by my standards, but might well have been acceptable by his, therefore the discussion can go no further".
Relativism reduces morality to little more than a preference, and makes it as impossible to reason or debate about morality as it is to debate about whether you should like your eggs sunny side up. Very few are really moral relativists; the logical consequences of believing in it are usually too much for people to stomach.
(This doesn't mean moral facts exist, though! There are more options available than just moral relativism or moral objectivism, not that the article bothers thinking about any of them)
And it doesn't make it impossible to debate about morality - merely futile.
I don't see what's so difficult to accept in this, frankly.
Because you're stopping once you reach the conclusion you like and not seeing where it leads.
Debating about morality is a pre-requisite for, for example, coming to agreement on a community standard on a moral question of behaviour. And if it's futile to debate about morality, then of course it's futile to try to define a community standard on a moral question of behaviour.
Without consensus on standards of behaviour, communities and societies fall apart. People value communities and societies. Therefore people value being able to debate about morality.
You can argue about and agree upon a standard of behavior without it being a moral standard. In fact, I'd argue that's exactly what most laws are. When the CA road laws say that drivers must keep a 3-foot buffer from cyclists, is that a moral rule?
Now, it may be that you still need some moral axioms to build those standards upon, but you don't need to argue about them, merely to have enough people with a roughly similar pattern. The dissenters will just be made to comply by force.
Logic doesn't care if you agree or not, it just takes you to the conclusion anyway. And if that reveals you to have an incoherent position, so be it.
Also, you're not going to get far trying to define away moral aspects. _Why_ was the cycle law enacted? Presumably to reduce cyclist deaths. Why reduce those? You get to a moral question incredibly quickly from the most arcane law.
And your thinking that you can find a majority with "roughly similar pattern" without any need for debate is effectively saying "a majority will agree on fundamental moral axioms" and now you're nowhere near relativism. You might as well have posited the article's "moral facts", at this point.
Moral relativism doesn't imply that everyone's subjective moral are all and always incompatible with each other. As people's subjective moralities change this way and the other, clusters are bound to happen - those are the "majorities".
What I deny is that any of those are the one objective morality. It's just the latest sample from the RNG. Tommorrow will bring new ones.
I too deny that any of the axioms are the one objective morality (although the clusters of moral belief over time are nothing like you'd get from a RNG, and tomorrow broadly speaking does not bring new ones, but that's a digression).
And this case is a perfect example. In this case, you've pretty quickly ended up having to argue that "laws can be/are built on moral axioms that come about by chance because random moral preference generation will result in coincidental clusters of agreement"
Which contradicts the observed facts of moral development, aside from all the other problems with it.
You could spend a lot of time trying to shore this up, or could just start again with a better foundation than moral relativism.
Well I contradict your observed facts. Look at all the major religions, legal systems, there the similarities and differences are many.
I don't feel the need to hold a position that applies to everyone. Taking it to something I understand better, like coding standards. I could care less what people decide the rules are, they seem completely arbitrary to me. I'm happy to go with what's gone before, and if people want to fight about new ones I'll leave them to it.
Because metaethical moral relativism wouldn't accept that. It says you might as well have a discussion about which colour is the best and try to reach a conclusion everyone agrees on.
i don't see how accepting that people can fight and decide on rules, means that i think there's any meaning in it and why that means i agree, disagree or care about the conclusion.
> It says you might as well have a discussion about which colour is the best and try to reach a conclusion everyone agrees on.
that seems pretty close to how i feel about it.
"Fight" is probably the misleading point. People can and will fight about meaningless things, yes. Perhaps "debate" would be better, because that implies meaning in the discussion.
I think you can reasonably debate, compare and judge coding styles -- "which is more readable?", "which aids understanding better?", etc -- in a way you can't reasonably debate "which is the best colour?".
You can be a moral relativist and take a pragmatic position that traditions or societal consensus are worth having without disappearing in a puff of logic.
Not really, because if you believe the relativism you must believe that moral consensus can't be reached.
What you are saying is very close to "You can be a climate change denier and take the pragmatic position that we need to change our behaviour to stop the earth heating up"
I won't throw a segfault if I take a descriptive moral relativistic position and simultaneously think that honour killings are wrong.
I am logical and well-read enough to realize that most of our Western courts have allowed honour killings but called them "crimes of passion"[1] and until not that long ago that could be a complete defence against a charge of murder. It is still an acceptable partial defence in some courts and some judges apparently advocate its return in others [2].
So by recognizing the moral relativism inherent in that situation, am I normatively obligated to think honour killings are A-OK? I don't think so, I am however apparently outside the moral consensus on that subject, so what do I know.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_passion
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9020632...
Among other things, one of the potential consequences of metaethical moral relativism is that you and I can't actually say anything meaningful to one another about honour killings beyond "I feel they are bad" or "I feel they are good".
Or to put this a slightly different way: your culture (apparently) thinks honour killings are OK. You disagree. On what grounds? If a moral statement is true relative only to the consensus belief of a culture, and your culture says honour killings are right, then you must necessarily be wrong to disagree. (See 4f in the link for more on that).
If you reject that, as it sounds like you possibly do, then you reject philosophical moral relativism. You can keep the anthropological one, though.
I'd be curious to know what grounds you would argue against a topic you find morally objectionable. What would you say are the proper foundations for moral axioms?
Update: and to answer your question, I'm not sure I have good reasons beyond "I feel they are bad", I do aim for coherence and consistency even when I'm not confident that I have a solid logical foundation, but it's hard to feel committed to any particular consensus. For background, I was raised in two different countries with two different cultures and languages, my politics were diametrically opposite those of one of my grandfathers who I still loved, I never met the other because he was an abusive alcoholic that thankfully abandoned the family. I am a bit of a Camusian outsider I guess.
I think this is all the author wants to prove. We, as a society, seem to be of two minds about this. He's not trying to prove that moral facts exist.
> "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
Sir Charles James Napier may not have earnestly bought into cultural relativism, but the sentiment he expresses is not inherently incompatible with it.
You don't need to believe that your system is "correct" in some sort of universal way. You merely need to believe that your system will be best for your personal interests.
One other things:
> "You don't need to believe that your system is "correct" in some sort of universal way. You merely need to believe that your system will be best for your personal interests."
Relativism is not egoism.
Right or wrong have absolutely nothing to do with it. It can't, because without a universal morality any notion of universal "right" or "wrong" evaporates. This is about refusing to tolerate another culture not because "it is wrong" but rather because it is beneficial to you to do so.
Your problem here is that you seem to be assuming some sort of universal "respect the right of others to coexist" or "live and let live" morality, where you should not stamp out other cultures unless you have determined that they are "wrong". This sort of universal tolerance for other systems of morality does not exist. It really simply doesn't; history would be far less bloody if it did.
People that do not believe in universal morality are still very capable of acting only in their own best interests, at the expense of others. Egoism is not incompatible with moral relativism.
How so, as long as you accept that those meta-judgements are still subjective?
So a moral relativist can say something like "I dislike your approval of female genital mutilation", but this is not a claim about the rightness or wrongness of the approval of female genital mutilation. It is instead a claim about their own sentiments. This is just like saying "Well I don't like sushi" in response to a friend saying that they like sushi. You'r not saying that them liking sushi is wrong.
Or to put it in another way, meta-ethical moral relativism doesn't require normative relativism.
So it's not uncontroversial to say that you can be an objectivist moral relativist. In any case, this discussion has been about metaethical relativism.
> If you're not prepared to give up all claims on how others should act, then you're not really a moral relativist.
My only claim extends as far as I can act or influence others to act to serve my own needs and wants. Am I not a moral relativist?
I'm not sure that the author is commenting on society, but young people who are morally relativistic. I think he badly misrepresents their argument and doesn't really make one of his own.
That egoism, not moral relativism.
I took it that the author was making the following point about our society: we teach them in school that things like "cheating is wrong" is mere opinion, and yet similar judgments like "tax-evasion is wrong" aren't treated as mere opinions when they grow up.
> and yet similar judgments like "tax-evasion is wrong" aren't treated as mere opinions when they grow up.
I don't see anything like that written in the article, where did you take that from?
You don't have to be a moral relativist to see that the foundations of moral facts are often built on sand.
The author blustered about how awful his strawman was, played semantic games on his son, and proved nothing at all.